The Poll

I clicked on Uncle Ken's link.  Down at the bottom of the page were two other links that explained more details about how the poll was conducted.  I clicked on the second one, and here's what I found:

"Methodology: This poll was conducted from August 05-07, 2019, among a national sample of 1960 Registered Voters.  The interviews were conducted online and the data were weighted to approximate a target sample of Registered Voters based on age, race/ethnicity, gender, educational attainment, and region.  Results from the full survey have a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points."

I have often wondered how they contact people to conduct these polls, in person, by telephone, or what.  This one says that it was conducted online, but it doesn't say if it was by email or what.  To be truly random, the pollsters should have contacted the polees instead of the other way around but, if I got an email like that, I would have sent it to my spam file if my email provider had not already done so.  If I had gotten it by snail mail. I would have thrown it into the trash can, which is what we used before spam files were invented.  If I had been contacted by telephone, I would have told the caller to "Shut up and leave me alone!", which is what I say to all telephone solicitors.  If they contacted their 1960 subjects, what are the chances that they all would have willingly cooperated?  So what do they do about the ones who don't, do they just keep contacting people until they get the desired number of willing subjects?  Wouldn't that compromise the randomness of the poll?

Then there's this part:  "the data were weighted to approximate a target sample of Registered Voters based on age, race/ethnicity, gender, educational attainment, and region."  This sounds fishy to me but, truth be known, I have no idea what it means, and I have always been told that I have excellent verbal skills.  Would one of my esteemed colleagues like to translate it into my native tongue?

Be that as it may, I suppose we will have to put up with a certain amount of additional gun regulations eventually.  I believe it was 1968 when they first started doing the background checks and registering each new gun purchase, and many of my ilk thought it was the end of the world.  Well the world is still here and we still have our guns.